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]]>Brandon and I have just finished transferring all of our CDs into slim CD sleeves. We kept the specially packaged discs as-is, but I wish we had switched out the generic plastic cases long ago because getting rid of them was a fantastic way to condense our collection!

I know many people keep their discs in binders or just go completely digital, but CD sleeves work best for us. Yes, we’ve imported a lot of our music into iTunes, but there is something to be said for being able to grab an obscure CD and pop it into the stereo rather than having to update a playlist and resync the iPod.

Organizing our collection this way allows for easy expansion while still keeping it all alphabetical. We also like that we can keep a handful of discs by the stereo safe in their sleeves, rather than having them sit out unprotected as they would be had we grabbed them from a binder. We ordered from JewelSleeve after Ana mentioned them when I asked for CD storage advice. Brandon and I love that the sleeves can hold the booklet and the tray card, leaving the spine with the artist and album title visible for easy browsing. If you’re looking for CD sleeves, I highly recommend them!

We’re storing all of our CDs, DVDs, and video games (we have a lot of media) in three hopen drawer units in Brandon’s office.

They look great and they’re working well for us, but I do have one complaint; the drawers don’t open fully and it’s hard to see what’s at the back. To counteract this, we placed blocks at the back to push the CDs forward. The blocks are made of 5″ wide boards of thick foam-core (available in craft stores), stacked up to make 3″ tall blocks. Then I cut single strips of thin foam-core to separate each row of CDs, keeping our rows nice and neat.

The random stacks of CDs that we didn’t have room for are gone now. All of our discs (1500 or so) fit nicely into four drawers, and it feels so good to have solved one of our biggest storage dilemmas.

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]]>I went out to Jubilee Furniture Co. this weekend to pick up a black swivel chair that I saw on BarryBlog. His photos are far better than mine, but I did snap a few shots of things that caught my eye. There were so many pieces that just needed a quick sprucing up with a coat of paint or some new fabric, and the prices are really reasonable.

The chair was intended for Brandon’s office but now that I have it here, it seems a little too short. It’s comfortable though, and it doesn’t make the loud CREAK that his current chair does whenever anyone sits down in it.

Oh, and I just have to share my favorite little seating area at Jubilee: the kids’ conference table. I don’t think it’s for sale. I think it’s there so that the kids that visit can have a place to sit and color. :)

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]]>I went ahead and got some arrows like I had wanted! They’re in Brandon’s office, four feet up and safely out of reach. Sweetshorn had sold out of arrows (though they’ve since been restocked), and so I bought mine on eBay.

I told Brandon that they were in his office because they’re manly. He then asked if I had also considered some other manly decorating ideas, like a bowl of knives or a fish tank of bullets.

Bookshelves line one wall of the room, and as I showed you last week, that’s where all of our DVDs are currently stored.

Brandon displays a lot of his stuff on top, and also on the shelves above.

The desk was left behind by our home’s previous owners, and the chair is from IKEA. Brandon doesn’t work from home like I do, so we figured that the chair would be fine for light, occasional use. It looks nice but unfortunately it has developed a loud creak that we can’t fix.

What’s that on his desk in lieu of fresh flowers, you ask? Fire Flowers!

OK, so his office is more like a combination of Google Maps PLUS geeky pop culture references.

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]]>Brandon and I are still weighing our options for CD and DVD storage, but we think we’ve settled on the perfect solution for us. Thank you for all of your suggestions and advice!

As I had mentioned, we’re not ready to go 100% digital. We’re probably about 40% there… Brandon has 34 GB of music on his computer, and I have another 22GB on mine. We do have most of the music we currently listen to on our computers, but we still play CDs all the time. And Brandon is a movie person. I think I have 10 or 15 DVDs, but Brandon has about 700. PLUS video games. Here’s where they’re all stored:

Those are Billy bookcases with doors in Brandon’s office, but we’ve filled them to capacity. Overfilled them, actually. And we don’t have any more room in our house for additional storage… unless we can use the dead space under the stairs leading to the second floor. The room looked like this when we moved in:

We just lined up the bookcases to block that big open space. If we got a couple of media cabinets from Can-Am though, I think we could install them so they seem built-in.

Brandon and I are both crazy about the way Rearranged Design stored their CDs. If we get the same CD sleeves and these DVD sleeves, we could fit everything into one tidy space. The only problem? This will not be an inexpensive undertaking. BUT…

The CD sleeves show the spine of each CD insert, so they’re still browsable.

The DVD sleeves hold the covers without cutting or folding them, and they hold two discs.

This setup would solve our storage problem and we’d still have room to grow.

Alphabetization would be easier to maintain with sleeves than with a binder.

Taking out a few CDs at a time with their corresponding sleeves seems easier than grabbing a bunch of loose discs from several different binders.

The cabinets have a safety feature to prevent toppling by only allowing one drawer to be pulled out at a time. Brandon was almost crushed by a filing cabinet once, so he’s all too familiar with the danger. We will soon have a curious toddler, so this feature is a big plus for us.

The drawers can be locked. Again, with a curious toddler on the way this is another big plus.

We could FREE UP SOME SPACE in the rest of the house.

Now we’re just trying to decide if we want to tackle this whole project at once, or if we should do it in phases. We could start with the CDs first, storing them in boxes that we already have. And when we move on to the DVDs (and outgrow the boxes), we could find an affordable dresser instead of the cabinets to save money. Or do we just spring for it all now? It’s a little crazy, but it would be so nice after it’s finished.

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]]>The sisal rug in our dining room is about five years old, and it has a big threadbare spot on it that was just made much worse this weekend by vacuuming. Luckily, FLOR just opened a store in Chicago, so Brandon and I headed out to see what we could find.

We went through, grabbing a sample of each carpet style and color that interested us. Then we started narrowing down the choices (too dark, too light, can’t withstand heavy foot traffic, and so on), until we ended up with our final selection: Feelin Groovy in Pewter.

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First, a big thank you to everyone for your input (White Molded Chairs)! We chose option #3, and the old broken chair was replaced with IKEA’s Jakob swivel chair. As I had mentioned before, this isn’t a true home office – Brandon only sits there for short periods white internet surfing or playing around with iTunes. We both find the new chair comfortable, though it probably wouldn’t be great as a full-time office chair.

The pendant (which we had already switched out earlier) was replaced with an $8 orange shade. I also switched out the rug. I liked the one that was already in there, but at 3’x5′, it was a little too small. I grabbed the brown and white rug that was in my office (5’x7′), and the size is much better. An orange pillow from west elm (from a few years ago) completed the room.

And now, because it’s fun, I threw together another magazine-style layout with sources:

The house is really coming together now! We’ve only had bits and pieces done until now, but it’s so much more satisfying to see it shape up as a whole. Here’s another view:

I love the dashes of white and orange in all three rooms. Cohesiveness makes me happy. :)

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]]>Now that I’ve taken photos of Brandon’s office, I’m really hating the cheap (somewhat broken) office chair that’s in there. I’m looking for a new one that’s either white molded plastic or fiberglass. Unfortunately, most of the chairs that I like are a bit out of our budget! That said, here are nine options that I’ve been looking at, ranging from $14.99 to $1232 (a girl can wish)…